What’s another word for Thesaurus?

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‚r‘, except at the beginning of a word.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don’t allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

It’s very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that’s not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It’s a gut feeling.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Be not a slave of words.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

Black men don’t like to be called ‚boys,‘ but women accept being called ‚girls.‘

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

Words are loaded pistols.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

I ain’t never called nobody no redskin. I’ve never been mad, like, ‚Get out of this restaurant, you redskin.‘

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.